Wow, an extreme sport I’d never even heard of.  Castells in Catalonia go back to the end of the 18th century.  From the Castellers de Vilafranca:

Els Castellers de Vilafranca som una associació cultural que tenim com a objectiu aixecar castells.

 

Los Castellers de Vilafranca son una institución cultural y deportiva catalana que tiene como principal objetivo hacer castells (castillos, torres humanas).

 

Les Castellers de Vilafranca sont une institution culturelle et sportive catalane qui a comme principal objectif construire des castells (constructions humaines).

 

The Castellers de Vilafranca is a cultural and sporting association whose main objective is to build castells (human towers).

From Alex Dragulescu’s site:

Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

I think it’s more accurate to say that this is a work of aleatory art, designed by the artist, with the fine details supplied by an outside source not under the control of the artist.  Using computer viruses is a nice gimmick, but sudokus or random number generators or DNA sequences would work just as well.

Alternatively, the artist may have produced a work of conceptual art, consisting of a pretty image plus a pretentious story about the image.  The combined work might get a showing in a gallery, where the image alone would not.  The consumer, viewing the image and hearing the story, has no way of knowing whether the story is true, but maybe the lack of verifiability is also part of the piece.

Reader CET sent this as a .wmv file attached to an email.  It turns out that there are several of these on YouTube.

This is one of those things that is either totally delusional or a sly parody and it’s hard to tell which.  It’s like Sarah Palin doing Sarah Palin vs. Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin.  Life imitating Art, or Art imitating Life?  Beyond a certain point, the question becomes meaningless.

It’s hard to describe the fascination of the Mandelbrot Set.  It’s something that is “already out there” in the sense that it is implied by some simple equations.  All it takes to explore it is billions of multiplications carried out to 100 decimal places.  It’s a fractal, so at any magnification, it’s somewhat similar.  On the other hand, it never repeats exactly, so it’s always different.  There’s always something that no one has ever seen before because no one has done the multiplications.  You might say that this is a two-dimensional, graphical version of looking at a billion digits of Pi.  A description is here.

xkcd is an internet comic, a strange combination of sophisticated humor and really bad art.  I can imagine a Gary Larson or a Gahan Wilson doing this cartoon with decent art, or maybe a Stephen Wright turning this into standup comedy, minus the art.  I can imagine a whole Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode based on the idea.  And yet, here it is, a few words and some stick figures.

Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).